


Winner's Circle

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Depression, Dreambubbles, Game Over!characters, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 09:07:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18465838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: Your name is John Egbert. You are one of the only survivors of an entire timeline.Sometimes, you visit your sister.





	Winner's Circle

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this on my tumblr right before it could get Jossed by the epilogue, so I guess I'll post it here too.

You’re not looking for her. That’s what you tell yourself. You don’t think about the timeline or people you left behind. It’s not worth it, and there’s no point. But people have been pestering you to go find Terezi, who’s been gone for a long time and who hasn’t answered her phone in months, and the furthest ring doesn’t blend well with your powers. So when you zap away to find what you’re missing, you find something else instead.

At first, you’ve done so well forgetting timelines and alternates that you see her sitting there in full God Tier garb and ask, “Jade? What are you doing here?" 

‘It hit me like a punch to the gut’ is a cliche. But you tell anyone who criticizes your movies that cliches don’t happen for no reason. They get repeated because they’re true. When your sister turns eyes blank as peeled eggs in your direction, you feel an ache spring up in your stomach and your lungs go empty.

She’s sitting on the edge of a wooden stage. The green curtains hanging off its frame are faded and frayed. Brightly colored flowers peel off the backdrops. They look like a child’s drawing of her old greehouse. Did she make it herself?

"John!” She scrambles to her feet and launches herself at you. Her hug and her stream of questions would stop your breath if shock hadn’t done that already. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you and Roxy and Davesprite and Rose for ages. Have you been hiding somewhere? We thought some of the others might be, but I didn’t know why you wouldn’t come right back.” She talks so fast that you can’t think of how to respond, so it’s your body that gives you away. She pulls back abruptly and looks into your eyes. Her ears flatten against her skull. “You have a heartbeat,” she says.

“Sorry,” you say.

Jade backs up a few paces. Her ears still reflect a dog on guard. “I’m sorry for jumping on you like that. You must be from the new timeline. Vriska said there must one out there, because she met a version of herself that was alive.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know why we were doomed, though. I thought I did everything right.”

How are you supposed to tell her it’s all your fault? “It’s me,” you say, to reassure her. “I’m from your timeline. It’s just… it gets complicated after that.”

“I have a lot of time.” Her ears lose a little tension, although they don’t stand back up all the way. “Can you stay for a while and tell me?”

Terezi’s been missing for a while. She can take care of herself, and you’re not having much luck searching anyway. “Sure.”

Jade has always been a good listener. She gasps and pats your arm at appropriate intervals in your story as you give her the broad strokes. I got new powers. Everyone died. Terezi told me how to fix it. I did.

“Everyone must be so grateful,” she says.

“I guess so? They don’t bring it up much.” It’s hard to be grateful when you don’t understand what the alternative is. They don’t know the fate they avoided, and you don’t want to remember it. 

“It’s funny that’s what Terezi had you change, and that it worked. I’ve seen her a few times, and she doesn’t like to mention it. But Vriska said the living version of her was really mean.”

You’ve heard similar things in confidence. Besides Terezi, no one much cares if the Thief of Light comes home. “I didn’t talk to her for very long. She kind of disappeared after that.”

Jade frowns. “Wait… if you’re from my timeline… how did that work, since there must have been another version of you?”

You had really, really hoped she wouldn’t ask that.

“He died,” you say shortly. “A little into the trip. To make room.”

She doesn’t gasp. Instead she breathes out, a quiet huff as the air leaves her. “How did we take it?”

You look away. “Not we. Dave sprite died too.”

Jade doesn’t say anything for a long time. She sinks down onto the edge of the stage again, and after a moment you sit down too, with a careful few inches between your shoulders. Hers are trembling.

“I can’t even imagine,” she says finally. “How am I? How… is she?”

“You’re fine.”

Her lips press together. “Of course. I’m always fine. I don’t know why I asked.”

“Have you… seen them?” You’d been reluctant to return to the furthest ring. If you ran into another John, dead at thirteen because of you, you’re not sure what you’d say.

“No. And we’ve looked.” Her voice shakes. “We looked so hard.”

“It was a big choice the denizens gave us. Maybe…” You drag your foot along the ground. “Maybe they had to be gone all the way.”

“It’s not fair,” she says quietly. And maybe it’s because it’s Jade saying this - Jade, who raised herself from childhood and put up with all your bullshit and is dead, dead in front of you while you’re still breathing - you finally let yourself agree.

“It sucks.”

“Will you come back?” she asks when you break your long silence and say you have to go. “You’re the only one who remembers traveling together.”

Everyone on Earth C has divided themselves up into groups that don’t include you. There are only so many hours you can budget to movies or staring at the ceiling. “Sure,” you say. “I can do that.”

“I told everyone I met you, and people have been asking,” she says the next time you visit. “They wanted to know where Roxy, Davesprite, and Rose are. We haven’t seen them either.”

“Roxy came back from the other timeline with me. Didn’t I tell you last time?”

“I don’t remember… maybe you did. My thoughts get jumbled a lot out here.” She gestures toward the horizon, where enormous tea pots rise out of tangled jungle. With surroundings like this, you’re not surprised she could get mixed up. She was always forgetful before. “What about the others?”

You’d only heard about the sprites squared secondhand - they vanished somewhere and haven’t been seen since. “They… something weird happened to them. I don’t know what’s going on with that. But… I’d tell people not to expect them any time soon.”

She bites her lip and nods. “Kanaya’s not going to like hearing that.”

“Sorry.” An enameled cat painted on two stories of ceramic regards you accusingly. “I get Dave sprite a lot more now. I wish I could’ve told him that.”

Jade doesn’t look at you. “I don’t remember the last thing I said to him. None of us were talking much by the end, and you don’t think about that kind of thing when you see someone every day. There’s always tomorrow.”

You don’t remember what you said to the people from your timeline either. You could change it - you can go anywhere in time and space, teleport right in and tell them,  _This is what you mean to me. This is what I want you to know._  But what would be the point?

“I do know the last thing I said to Rose, though,” Jade continues. “I still have all our conversations saved in Pesterchum. I reread them sometimes during our trip. I spent three whole years thinking of how I’d say hello.”

“You never said hi?” You had briefly. Rose had wanted you to tell Roxy something. What had her message been? 

“No. First I was evil, and then I was dead.”

“I don’t know what you said in the new timeline, but you did meet then. Obviously.”

She nods. “At least all of you could be happy.”

Are all of you happy? You think of Terezi, still missing in the void looking for someone who’s never coming back. You think about you. “Yeah,” you say. “At least there’s that.”

Your visits get more frequent. After long breaks, the gap between your ages is too jarring. You’re taller than her now. Were you really that young when you played the game?

She offers to bring Dave to say hi once, but you turn her down. “I could hang out with Dave on Earth if I wanted to,” you say. “Although he hangs out a lot more with Karkat. They’re dating, isn’t that weird?”

“Not really. He spends most of his time with the trolls here. I see Jake more than I see him.”

“I mean, because he’s a boy.”

One of her ears flicks back. “I never understood why people got so hung up on things like that. I never saw the difference.”

“Wait, are you saying you would date a girl?”

She shrugs. “Maybe in another life.”

You had another life, and it doesn’t have much to recommend itself. It’s your first one you revisit now. It’s funny. When you were on the Prospitian battleship, all you wanted was to get off of it. You didn’t think you were having any fun. So where are all these good memories coming from? The two of you sit together and revisit them. Remember when we made dinner together that first night? you’ll ask each other. Remember when Nanna baked us all birthday cakes and we made wishes when we blew out the candles? Remember, remember, remember?

You haven’t told any of the others about this. They wouldn’t care - this isn’t “their” Jade, after all - but also you want something of your own. Jade covers her mouth when you tell her about Rose and Kanaya’s wedding and asks you to congratulate them for her. You explain your living sister spends a lot of time away exploring other worlds. One day you bring her a photo Jade sent you a little after her twentieth birthday of herself on an alien planet. Jade stares at it for a long time before handing it back and saying “So that’s what I would’ve looked like if I’d grown up.”

Sometimes you just sit quietly in each other’s company. You don’t tell her that you barely speak to anyone back on Earth, that you feel like all your friends are actors played by people who aren’t doing a very good job, and if you push a tree too hard it’ll fall over and reveal itself to be painted plywood like something out of the  _Twilight Zone_. You don’t say that for every year your dead sister, forever sixteen, doesn’t show, you feel like you’re carrying twice that weight, and that even though you’re a Breath player, it’s getting harder and harder to breathe. You don’t share that Caliborn has been bothering you for a rematch, and you’re thinking maybe you should take him up on it. It’d be nice to have a problem you can hit again. Maybe the others would want to come. It could be as close to old times as you’re going to get.

“Do you think I made the right decision?” you ask one day to break the silence.

She looks at you. She’s realized you hate seeing her blank eyes and usually keeps her gaze averted. The sight still makes you flinch. “Oh John,” she says. “I don’t know.”

“This timeline is because of me. I should have found a better way, a way everyone could’ve been ok. But I just… took orders. That’s all I ever do. I take orders and get people hurt.” It’s hard to force the words out. They wobble and crack, but you don’t cry. You won’t cry. “I’m sorry. I never wanted things to turn out this way.” The last bit is hardest. If you say it out loud, will all the stage dressings of the world you go back to fall down? Will the actors playing your friends believe you think they’re not worth what you did? “I think I made a mistake.”

“It’s ok,” she says.

“It’s not ok.” Your voice rises, and for the first time in years you feel heat prickling at your eyelids. “I was just trying to fix things.” Your hands flicker with blue-white light and you know you could keep trying, go back to reset things again and again like a gamer angling for a high score, but you’ll never get back that first life you lost. There’s no way to win without leaving a million dead ends in your wake. Or if there was, you weren’t good enough to find it. “All I was ever trying to do was save you.”


End file.
